The problems facing Pyne

Last week was bad enough, but
Christopher Pyne
and
Tony Abbott
aren’t out of the woods yet on school education. Now they face two weeks of Parliament in which Labor will be going all out to turn their prevaricating on school funding into the great big broken promise that defines the Abbott government.

Pyne and Abbott are both products of Jesuit schooling and their parsing skills will be at a premium as they are reminded again and again of phrases uttered during the election campaign such as: “You can vote Liberal or Labor and you will get exactly the same amount of funding for your school" (Pyne), “As far as school funding is concerned, Kevin Rudd and I are on a unity ticket" (Abbott).

Yes, we know they carefully hedged these statements in the fine print by saying that their promise to match Labor’s school funding was for the period of the forward estimates. That is, it covered four years, not the six years of Gonski funding promised by Labor. And the bulk of the Gonski money Labor promised was not coming until the fifth and sixth years, which meant the Coalition was actually promising considerably less.

It was all too clever by half. The average parent would not have been aware of the finer Jesuitical details when they heard Abbott’s promises during the election campaign. When they hear that the Coalition’s spending on schools will be much less than that promised by Labor they will be justified in deciding they’ve been conned.

And as for Pyne’s unequivocal promise that each school will get exactly the same amount of funding under the Coalition as it would have under the Gillard government: Tony Abbott’s approach to that one on Sunday was to deny its plain meaning. How very Labor of him. His amended line is that the overall amount of funding is the same.

Code words and broken promises

The regrettable aspect of this is that Pyne and Abbott appear to want to put the Gonski school funding plan into the same basket as the other Labor initiatives they have turned into code words for waste, profligacy and broken promises. Words such as Pink Batts, carbon tax, NBN, and building the education revolution.

But unless Pyne thinks he has the time and energy to start again and do another review of school funding, then Gonski and its associated studies constitute a major part of the information he has. He would be a fool to throw it away.

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The key Gonski principle, that all school children should have their education funded on an equivalent basis – with an equal base amount plus consistent loadings for specific disadvantages – should be retained.

If he’s willing to do that, then he has to work out how much extra money needs to be spent on kids with particular disadvantages, such as being indigenous, having a disability, coming from a remote area or being from a non-English speaking background.

Then cabinet has to decide how much money it is actually willing to spend. It is inevitable that savings, and compromises, will have to be made.

If Pyne gets this far then he will be in the thicket of deciding how to put the policy into practice in eight different state and territory school systems, as well as Catholic schools and independent schools. This is where it gets really complex and some of the barbs he threw at Labor last week for its inconsistencies may well come back and bite him.

How will he treat Catholic and independent schools? No doubt they will get a good deal, just like under Labor before him.

Positive difference in later years

And how will he treat pre-school education? There is persuasive evidence that quality pre-school makes a huge positive difference to childrens’ educational achievement in later years. Australia’s spending on early childhood education is well below the OECD average. And according to the Mitchell Institute for Health and Education, in a background paper for an education forum held last week, “the marginal returns for increased investment are likely to be very high".

Looming over everything is the problematic issue of deciding how to measure parents’ socio-economic status (SES). How should funding for private schools be adjusted to account for family wealth? And how should any additional funding offered to low SES children be worked out.

This issue, above all, is one which Pyne has to confront because it is the low SES kids who are not performing in the school system as it is now. Many programs have been tried to help these kids.

Says Lisa O’Brien, chief executive of the Smith Family, which focuses on improving education for the disadvantaged: “I think what’s needed now is that we have to look at the evidence of those [programs] that are working, pick a few winners, and take them to scale."

“There is a role for governments in ensuring the right programmatic responses are being funded and that those decisions are being made on a clear link between the intervention and improved student outcomes. And to some extent I think that clear link has not always been present in the past," Dr O’Brien said.

Pyne’s job is to find the clear links between educational programs and their results and act accordingly.

This week another piece of evidence will appear – the latest three-yearly Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) from the OECD which compares educational performance of 15-year-olds around the world. Australia has been sliding in reading since 2000. If the slide is continuing then Pyne has another problem to which he needs to find a solution.